The "Middle East and Terrorism" Blog was created in order to supply information about the implication of Arab countries and Iran in terrorism all over the world. Most of the articles in the blog are the result of objective scientific research or articles written by senior journalists.

From the Ethics of the Fathers: "He [Rabbi Tarfon] used to say, it is not incumbent upon you to complete the task, but you are not exempt from undertaking it."

Thursday, July 21, 2016

The UK's Broken Labour Party - Douglas Murray

by Douglas Murray

The election of an Islamist-sympathising, terrorist-sympathising,
Israel-bashing hardliner at the head of the second largest party in the
House of Commons undoubtedly changes the parameters of political
discourse in the UK.

With the prospect of another
Labour leadership election now gathering pace, tens of thousands more
activists have joined the Labour party. It seems unlikely that they will
be "moderates."

However solidly Theresa May's new Conservative government
performs, it will always seem the point -- so long as Corbyn is in
office -- that you are either for Britain or against it, for the
Conservative party or against the country.

A fractured and in-fighting opposition also means that there is
no meaningful, organised voice challenging the government in Parliament.
That principle -- the principle on which our system is based -- needs
to work well even (perhaps especially) if you support the government of
the day, because the government of the day needs to be kept alert to
error and on top of sensible criticisms if it is going to pass the best
legislation it can for the country.

Herbert Stein's law, "Things that cannot go on, won't," is one of the
best laws of politics. It works for fiscal issues and it usually works
for politics as a whole. The British Labour party, however, is currently
working to try to disprove this rule. To do them justice they are
having a good stab at doing so, which suggests that the maxim should
perhaps be re-written: "Things that cannot go on sometimes do."

Consider the latest developments in the party's recent unhappy
history. Earlier this month the party's specially commissioned inquiry
into anti-Semitism within the party found the party not guilty
of this bigotry for the second time in six months. Yet at the launch of
these findings, a grassroots member of Jeremy Corbyn's wing of the
party verbally bullied a female Jewish Labour MP until she left in
tears, and Jeremy Corbyn himself appeared to compare the Jewish state
with ISIS. Although this episode captured some headlines, it was a mere
footnote alongside the other catastrophes in the Labour party.

UK
Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn (left) appears at a press conference
with left-wing campaigner Shami Chakrabarti (right), to present the
findings of an inquiry into the Labour party's anti-Semitism, June 30,
2016.

At the same time as this was going on, Labour MPs attempted a coup to
get Jeremy Corbyn out of his position as head of the party. A carefully
orchestrated set of resignations from his Shadow Cabinet came in every
couple of hours until almost all of the Shadow Cabinet had resigned.
Corbyn also lost the support of the deputy leader of the party, Tom
Watson. A no-confidence motion saw 172 Labour MPs vote to say that they
had no confidence in their party leader, while only 40 Labour MPs
supported the party leader. This move meant that Jeremy Corbyn began to
have significant trouble finding enough supporters in the Parliamentary
Labour party to fill up his shadow cabinet. The joke in Westminster was
that those few who did stay loyal to him would find themselves having to
hold multiple briefs, so that somebody might easily find themselves
being appointed Shadow Home Secretary and Shadow Foreign Secretary.

The trouble appears that all of Corbyn's politics has a distinctly
unfunny, nasty air. It emerged this week (from another declaration of no
confidence in the leader) that earlier this year the Labour MP Thangam Debbonaire
was both appointed and then sacked as the party's Culture spokesperson,
all within 24 hours and all without even being told, while she was
undergoing treatment for cancer. Such stories of non-communication and
cruelty towards individual MPs have fanned the rather understandable
feeling that Jeremy Corbyn may not be suited to the highest peaks of
politics.

Unfortunately for the Labour party, it is not only MPs who have a
say. Under new rules unwisely drawn up under Corbyn's predecessor, Ed
Miliband, the Labour party can now be joined by anyone with £3 to spare.
All such people then have the right to vote on who the Labour leader
should be. Although the idea of having a say in any political party's
future for little more than the price of a cup of coffee may sound
appealing, it also leaves a party open to the possibility of a hostile
takeover from the most fanatical people in the country -- whether they
have the Labour party's interests at heart or not. This is exactly what
happened last year when Mr. Corbyn entered the Labour leadership race.
Tens of thousands of people from the grassroots, who were soon to form
themselves into the 'Momentum' movement, saw their chance to bring
hard-left politics into the UK mainstream. Jeremy Corbyn won almost 60%
of the vote in that election. In recent weeks, despite the formal
no-confidence vote of the Labour MPs, this grassroots support for Corbyn
only appears to have galvanised further. With the prospect of another
Labour leadership election now gathering pace, tens of thousands more
activists have joined the Labour party. It seems unlikely that they will
be "moderates."

Nevertheless, two "moderate" candidates for leader stepped forward,
inevitably splitting the anti-Corbyn vote, until they seemed to realise
this and one dropped out. Nevertheless, polls of party members suggest
it looks overwhelmingly likely that in the coming weeks Corbyn will
entrench his position by winning a landslide in a second ballot of the
party's members within a year.

Why does this matter? For two reasons. First, because the election of
Corbyn has poisoned British politics. The election of an
Islamist-sympathising, terrorist-sympathising, Israel-bashing hardliner
at the head of the second largest party in the House of Commons
undoubtedly changes the parameters of political discourse in the UK.
However solidly Theresa May's new Conservative government performs, it
will always seem the point -- so long as Corbyn is in office -- that
there is no party of the decent left available for the large proportion
of voters who would like such a thing. This leaves countless patriotic,
left-wing voters without a meaningful voice in Parliament.

A fractured and in-fighting opposition also means that there is no
meaningful, organised voice challenging the government in Parliament.
That principle -- the principle on which our system is based -- needs to
work well even (perhaps especially) if you support the government of
the day, because the government of the day needs to be kept alert to
error and on top of sensible criticisms if it is going to pass the best
legislation it can for the country.

The other reason why this principle matters is because it suggests
that vested interests matter more than truth. Herbert Stein's dictum
lacked one crucial ingredient: people's desire to look after themselves.
There are Labour party MPs already looking for a way out, including
looking to found a new party or parties. But they fear that way lies
electoral oblivion. So they stay, in a party wracked with in-fighting
and led by the most corrosive person their party has ever chosen in what
had been a noble history. And all the while that person in charge of
their party is busily mainstreaming the worst bigotries of our time.
When pushed to decide between their morals and their careers, the dictum
holds in the Labour party that things that cannot go on, find some way
to do so.

Douglas Murray, a British author and commentator, is based in London.Source: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8508/broken-labour-party Follow Middle East and Terrorism on TwitterCopyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.